Evaluation of manual and electronic healthcare-associated infections surveillance: a multi-center study with 21 tertiary general hospitals in China.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) are still a major health threats worldwide. Traditional surveillance methods involving manual surveillance by infection control practitioners (ICPs) for data collection processes are laborious, inefficient, and generate data of variable quality. In this study, we sought to evaluate the impact of surveillance and interaction platform system (SIPS) for HAIs surveillance compared to manual survey in tertiary general hospitals. METHODS: A large multi-center study including 21 tertiary general hospitals and 63 wards were performed to evaluate the impact of electronic SIPS for HAIs. RESULTS: We collected 4,098 consecutive patients and found that the hospitals installed with SIPS significantly increased work efficiency of ICPs achieving satisfactory diagnostic performance of HAIs with 0.73 for sensitivity, 0.81 for specificity and 0.81 area under the curve (AUC). However, there were significant heterogeneity own to regions, time of SIPS installation, departments and sample size. CONCLUSIONS: SIPS significantly improved ICPs efficiency and HAIs monitoring effectiveness, but there were shortcomings such as untimely maintenance and high cost.